Lean is Expensive

Lean in the vein of Paul Allen in his FastCap videos is a sometimes about being smart, but also about privilege. Recently he’s put up a few videos about great lean things he’s found: the elevator’s in a Trump building, a middle-eastern airline’s airplane interiors, an airport in Qatar. What do these things all have in common? They are expensive products. Especially in the video from a visit to Richelieu where he’s exclaiming about how great the Richelieu products are. Everything he’s looking at in Richelieu’s showroom is a luxury product. Of course it’s good. Someone paid smart designers to spend a lot of time making those products look and feel great. Business people won’t pay for smart designers to spend a month producing a product that’s going to be sold at a Big Box store to the masses for $10. And that’s a problem. With very few exceptions, companies differentiate their products by segmenting the market by making a continuum between terrible and ok products, then way up in the stratosphere other companies make the expensive, great products. Good for saving a few cents per widget to beef up the bottom line, bad because you are purposefully providing people a bad product when you don’t need to. Make great products for everyone.